It appears I have been tagged by Taylor Pratt in a meme. Between starting a new job at Ignite Social Media, buying a townhome, and starting some new client work I have been completely strapped as of late. I have been so busy, the blog has suffered a lot, and I feel this is partially why Talyor tagged me!!

Anyways, I know everyone out there has always been itching to know all about Brian Chappell, well not really Here are 8 off the wall things you might not have known about me:

• I scored 11 goals in my first soccer game I ever played in at the age of 5.
• I went to Virginia Tech for undergrad. GO HOKIES!
• I am an Armin Van Burren fanatic, and have been ever since I came across DI.FM about 2 years ago.
• I love to ride my mtn. bike and hike. Cary is a great town with many hidden trails and parks around. I just discovered this route the other day.
• I don’t like to follow the crowd, creating my own path is so much more exciting!
• I proposed to my Fiancé over winter break last year at the top of the London Eye.
• I am predicting my eyesight will be gone in under 5 years due to the fact I look at a computer monitor from 9am – 1am, 5 days a week.
• I eat Spicey, Smokey, Peach Salsa from Trader Joes every single day.

I tried to track the beginning of this meme and failed miserably. I am sure it goes back very far, way into 2007.

With that said, I have decided to single handedly put an end to this meme trail. This is the end of the line, no one else is getting tagged.

There is more to Social Media than front page Diggs…

If you think Social Media is all about getting on the homepage of Digg and only that, then you are wrong. Keep digging, there is a LOT more underneath the surface to be discovered. Most SEO’s get stuck on instantaneous traffic sources. The fact of the matter is that you need to take a holistic approach when implementing tactics in todays market for clients.

If you sell Social Media as a service on your SEO consulting site, you better be able to back it up with other tangible explanations vs. simply submitting content through power accounts, getting traffic (that wont convert for crap) and obtaining 25 backlinks from the linkerati and calling it Social Media.

There is more to reputation monitoring than subscribing to RSS feeds and other glorified RSS reader tools…

This space is growing as rapidly as any right now. Simply typing in a brand term and seeing results that come up from the major engines, blogs and websites just does not give you the whole picture. Aside from your key terms and brands you are monitoring, are you looking into trends around that phrase, are you looking into key influencers that you want to put on your radar around that term? There is no one solution here atm that does it all. However, understanding there is more to Reputation Management then exact match keyphrase monitoring, will help you going forward.

There is more to Social Media than Facebook and MySpace…

Facebook and MySapce to a degree got this all started. It really got marketers thinking about engagement beyond one sided conversations, and how to use it for business, outside of the daily personal ongoings that Facebook and MySpace facilitated. In reality that is exactly what Social Media is, leveraging two sided conversations in any form or fashion possible.

With all that said, I have decided to make a move. 3 years of in house, hyper competitive SEO poo slinging with theMadHat has taught me a lot (personal side note: look who’s ahead, your shady link tactics have been foiled! ). However, as of late things have started to get dull. Learning and connecting is the name of the game at this point so Ignite Social Media made sense. I am really looking forward to building out my Social Media skills and knowledge base over the coming years. I think Ignite Social Media Agency is a great place, and is going to be doing some fantastic things in the space. Keep an eye out.

Andy Beal, reputation management expert and avid blogger has put together what seems to be a great reputation monitoring tool called Trackur. It attempts to scour the web and find any and all mentions of the keyphrase you enter.

Other tools in this niche are some what far and few between. However there are a few tools already in existence, such as:

http://www.brandseye.com/
http://reputation.distilled.co.uk/
http://reputationdefender.com
http://www.sentimentmetrics.com
http://www.radian6.com
http://www.reputrace.com

There are several pricing models and options offered by Trackur:

• Trackur Standard
  1 saved search
  Email and RSS reports
  Updates every 12 hours
  $18/month

• Trackur Pro
  5 saved searches
  Email and RSS reports
  Updates/ 6 Hours
  88$/month

• Trackur Enterprise
  15 saved searches
  Email and RSS reports
  Updates/ 1 Hour
  188$/month

Is Trackur.com worth it?

It is hard to tell off the bat how thorough of a job the tools does at finding every single mention for a specific phrase. However, at first glance it seems to do a solid job. It scours technorati, blogs, flickr, the interweb and apparently video’s (guessing via the tagging system) as well as other sources.

What will make or break this tool in my eyes is the effectiveness and thoroughness of searching the web. I definitely sense the need for a tool that can do a good job of the aforementioned. One thing that stands out to me initially is the tool is very user friendly. It is simple and easy to use. You can quickly find the information your are looking for and can utilize a “saving” mechanism to come back to searches you have done in the past. Furthermore, you can subscribe to your searches via email alerts and RSS feeds, which is handy.

Get ready to open up the pocketbook if you plan to sign up with Trackur. The pricing model definitely seems aimed at businesses. If you do not have the means to large amounts of dispensable income then you will probably not be able to afford this tool. I can somewhat understand this because I am sure the tool is an absolute resource intensive hog. However, I would love to see a cheaper option for Trackur.com that allows individuals like myself to have access to the tool without breaking the bank account.

All in all, this tool looks promising. I am looking forward to seeing how the tool grows and will be updating this post as more details become available.

What are your initial thoughts on Trackur?

Drupal in my opinion is the most search engine friendly, out of the box, solution in existence today. However, with that said, there are still some things that need to be done to any installation to ensure search engine success, and save you from issues down the road.

Note: Keep in mind many of the tactics listed below are things that should be done from the get go. If you plan on implementing these tactics with a site that is already fully built, indexed and aged, then you are going to want to take different steps to ensure SERP disaster doesn’t ensue.

• First thing is first, turn on clean URLs (which is the same thing as entering /%postname%/ in the permalink structure section in Wordpress) Navigate to Home > Administration > Site Configuration > Clean URL’s. You need to make sure your server accepts mod_rewrite or this is not going to work.

• Go download the Drupal page title module. It is going to take some tinkering to get this to work, but in the end gives you the flexibility of having different page titles than your headings.

To make this work you need to make sure your theme has a template.php If it doesn’t then you will need to create one (the page title module has an example one you can use). These lines need to be added to the ‘page’ hook of the _phptemplate_variables function.

if (module_exists(’page_title’)) {
$vars[’head_title’] = page_title_page_get_title();
}

• Next, go download the global redirect module. This will take care of the duplicate content issues that arise from having a directory and a page with the same exact content. Eg., www.example.com/duplicate & www.example.com/duplicate/ This module will automatically redirect the “/” version of the page to the non “/” version, thus creating one version. You can also do this on your own by modifying your .htaccess file, but this is an easier solution.

• You will also want to alleviate any canonicalization issues that your site might see from backlinks that point to non www versions or www versions. Use the following code in your .htaccess file to ensure this is taken care of.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

• Drupal also creates duplicate content, similar to the directory issue noted above, in the /node/ section of your site. This is a very simple fix as well. Go into your robots.txt folder and block this section of your site with the following code:

Disallow: /node$

• Make sure you also download the Drupal Meta Tag module, this allows you to insert meta tags and description tags for each page/article you post on the site.

What other modules do you use to make your Drupal site SEO friendly?

Web Analytics is an ever evolving field with many big name players, and plenty of smaller competitors. Deciding what analytics package is the right fit for your site can be a tough process to go through.

Prices range from free (Google analytics) all the way in the tens of thousands of dollars per year (Omniture, Coremetrics, Webtrends). I have compiled a list of some of the top Ecommerce sites in the industry and noted what each site is using below. Hopefully this will help you gauge which product you might want to choose for your site.

Apparel / Fashion

• eBags.com - Google Analytics
• Landsend.com - Omniture SiteCatalyst
• Lids.com - WebTrends
• Bluefly.com - Coremetrics
• LLBean.com - Omniture SiteCatalyst

Electronics

• BestBuy.com - Omniture SiteCatalyst
• TigerDirect.com - Omniture SiteCatalyst
• Crutchfield.com - Omniture SiteCatalyst

Food

• SurLaTable.com - Omniture SiteCatalyst
• Cooking.com - Omniture SiteCatalyst
• Berries.com - Omniture SiteCatalyst

Jewelry

• BlueNile.com - Google Analytics
• Ice.com - Google Analytics
• Diamond.com - Google Analytics

Children / Toys

• OneStepAhead.com - Coremetrics
• KBToys.com - Omniture SiteCatalyst
• BabyAge.com - Google Analytics & Omniture SiteCatalyst

Office

• Staples.com - Coremetrics
• OfficeDepot.com - Coremetrics
• OfficeMax.com - Coremetrics

Mass Merchants

• SmartBargains.com - Coremetrics
• Walmart.com - Omniture SiteCatalyst
• Kmart.com - Omniture SiteCatalyst

Hat tip to grok for putting together the top ecommerce sites by niche

This is the breakdown of my findings. As you can see Omniture seems to be the clear favorite, followed by CoreMetrics and Google analytics and leading the back of the pack WebTrends, which in my opinion is a dieing platform, overpriced, and laden with bugs.

• Omniture SiteCatalyst - 12
• Coremetrics - 6
• Google Analytics - 5
• WebTrends - 1

From my personal experience if you have a small site, or even a large one as you can see above, Google Analytics is a great choice. They offer a free version which is extremely user friendly, as well as a paid version, called Urchin 5 (Urchin 6 is in beta). Urchin is still extroidinarily cheap compared to Omniture, Coremetrics, and Webtrends. If you are looking for FULL functionality and a very robust system you are going to want to choose between Omniture, Coremetrics, and Webtrends, but be ready to shell out thousands of dollars especially if your site gets a lot of traffic. Which platform have you found success with?

Update:

Aaron over at theMadhat pointed out the general pricing on Omniture, Coremetrics and Webtrends:

pricing from low to high: WT, Omniture, Coremetrics. with a diff of around 10k from wt to cm. quote is from last year.

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Courtesy of Michael, more official stats on market share right now in the industry.

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Pratt chimes in with a slick way to use Website Optimizers tests in GA and track metrics other than conversions on links.